Then They Came For Me (2 page)

Each week of my father’s incarceration, my mother carried my brother, Babak, to one of two prisons, Ghezel Qal’eh or Qasr, and waited outside for hours to find out if she would be allowed inside to visit her husband. Very often, she and the family members of other political prisoners were turned away. Meanwhile, as she raised Babak on her own and worked as a primary school teacher, she fought tirelessly for his release, using every connection she could. Eventually, it worked. My father’s sentence was reduced from fifteen years to two. The man who came home to her was even stronger than the one who had left.

Although my father had been tortured so badly by the prison guards that he had lost all of his teeth and his toenails were deformed, the many months he spent in solitary confinement had made him only more resilient and determined. The shah’s torturers crushed the Tudeh Party, but not my father. After his release, he was just as large a figure to his friends and relatives as he’d been before. As far as I could tell, he enjoyed this role. He was an impressive man, with large, beautiful eyes and full lips. He had dropped out of high school, but he knew hundreds of classic Persian poems by heart and spoke like a university-educated orator. He had tried to shape himself after the heroes of Soviet socialist realist novels: enigmatic proletarian revolutionaries who could have been successful in any profession, but instead chose to dedicate their lives to the ideals of the communist revolution. Helping the helpless and fighting for a better future for Iran had become part of my father’s identity.

As my father matured, he realized that revolutions and violence couldn’t heal Iran’s historical maladies. Despite the torture he had suffered at the hands of the regime, after he was
released from prison, in February 1957, he joined the government of the shah and tried to change the system from within. Through a combination of hard work, charm, and intelligence, he became a high-ranking manager in the Ministry of Industries and Mines and, eventually, the CEO of the government’s biggest construction company. As the CEO, my father made the welfare of the workers and their families his top priority. He helped them with housing, health insurance, and pensions. He proudly said that as a CEO, he was achieving what he’d never accomplished as a union activist.

Despite his hatred of the shah’s dictatorship, my father, and many other young Iranians of his generation, supported the monarch’s efforts to modernize the country. During the two decades that my father worked for the government, new industries were developed, many Iranian students were educated in the West, and Iranian arts and culture were heavily influenced by Europe and America. The shah’s Western allies, especially the United States, backed this rush to modernity, as well as the tyrannical rule that came with it. In many ways, the shah was the perfect partner for the West. He supplied Western nations with cheap crude oil and bought their most expensive high-tech military equipment for his ever-expanding army. The shah also allowed the United States to spy on Iran’s northern neighbor, the Soviet Union.

Many traditional and religious Iranians were alienated by this process of rash modernization. Even as a child, I could see that many of my relatives who lived in the poorer, more religious parts of the country held a grudge against my family because of my father’s position in the shah’s regime. They hated the fact that we lived in a big house and had a color television (a big deal in 1970s Iran), and they disapproved of our choices: my sister and mother refused to pray or wear the veil, and my father and his friends went through a few bottles of imported Scotch during their weekly poker games.

Even though the shah’s intelligence agents suppressed his critics, the gap between the religious masses and the shah’s pro-Western dictatorship gradually widened, and eventually this triggered an anti-Western, fundamentalist movement led by a high-ranking Shia cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Between 1965 and 1978, Khomeini lived in exile in neighboring Iraq, and from there, he communicated with his followers through photocopied leaflets and audiocassettes, manipulating people’s grievances against the shah and his relationship with the United States—claiming, in particular, that the shah and the States were working together to eradicate people’s religious beliefs. Khomeini promised to bring justice, independence, and prosperity to Iran. As more Iranians supported Khomeini, the shah became more desperate and insecure. In January 1978, the shah’s army opened fire on a gathering of Khomeini adherents, which succeeded only in bringing about greater public support for the Islamic movement. After a year of demonstrations and violent protests, the shah was overthrown, and on February 11, 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was established. Khomeini returned to Iran and was named the supreme leader—the spiritual leader of the country and the man with the final say in all affairs of the state.

It was not only religious Iranians who had supported Khomeini. Many secular Iranians who believed in the separation of mosque and state had also been in favor of Khomeini’s revolution. They simply had had enough of the shah’s despotism and kowtowing to the West, and they craved the democratic government and freedom of expression Khomeini promised. Even my father, who had come to hate the idea of a violent revolution and believed that the shah’s regime could be reformed from within, was happy about the shah’s downfall and the abolishment of American military and intelligence bases in Iran. “I’m not sure what will happen next,” my father used to say with
tears in his eyes. “But I can never forgive the shah and his American patrons for killing dozens of my friends.”

My father and many other Iranians who’d supported Khomeini’s revolution without knowing what would happen next paid a heavy price. Within a short time after coming to power, Khomeini set out to establish a fundamentalist government more repressive than the shah’s. The Islamic government began its systemic repression by summarily trying and executing many leaders of the shah’s army on the rooftop of Khomeini’s residence. Some days, while the revolutionaries were inside, having lunch or dinner with Khomeini, dozens of the shah’s security and military personnel would be murdered on the roof. Deciding that a new military organization was necessary to defend the newly established Islamic government against its enemies, Khomeini established the Revolutionary Guards. With their help, he began to crush opposition groups one by one—members of the shah’s former regime, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents. Many of the very people who’d helped bring Khomeini to power perished during his purges.

The revolution’s violent aftermath disrupted many lives and deeply affected my family; it utterly destroyed others. My father was immediately fired from his job and replaced by a young revolutionary with very little experience. Unable to find a job for years, he eventually had to retire and live on a small pension. That humiliation and shock affected my father far more than the torture he had had to endure in prison. He became a bitter and broken man, exasperated and easily agitated. He started to hate Khomeini and everything he stood for.

·   ·   ·

The second member of my family to be imprisoned was my sister, Maryam. In April 1983, when Maryam was twenty-six and I sixteen, my parents received a phone call saying that Maryam
had been arrested in the southern city of Ahvaz. Maryam had supported the Islamic Revolution from the beginning. She’d believed in Khomeini’s promise that the end of the shah’s reign would usher in an era of greater democratic values and freedoms. Maryam would quickly discover how wrong she had been.

It never surprised me that Maryam so vigorously supported the revolution. Like our father, she put everything she had into her beliefs. She was passionate about people, and wanted to help them. She was also very passionate about the arts. She took ballet lessons and loved to draw and paint. Maryam and I were two different people: she was compassionate and expressive, whereas I have always been reserved. Still, she was my best friend.

Even though Maryam was ten years older than I, we had an uncanny understanding of each other. We were so close that we could communicate with just a look, a sigh, or by a certain movement of our hands. Her taste in music, films, and books influenced me greatly, and our shared love for the arts brought us closer together. Maryam loved Al Pacino, and I have seen every movie of his, beginning with
Dog Day Afternoon
, which I saw when I was eight. She loved Stravinsky’s music and ballets, and throughout my life, I have tried to see every performance of
The Firebird
and
The Rite of Spring
I could get to.

In 1979, at the age of twenty-three, Maryam followed in my father’s footsteps and became a member of the Tudeh Party, which, despite the regime change and Khomeini’s promise of tolerance, was still illegal. Two years later, she fell in love with Mohammad Sanadzadeh, an engineer who had recently graduated from Tehran University. They married in 1981 and moved to the city of Ahvaz, in the southern province of Khuzestan, where Mohammad had grown up. Soon after, their son, Khaled, was born. A year earlier, the Iran-Iraq War had begun, after Saddam Hussein’s army attacked Khuzestan. Iraq’s border dispute
with Iran had started in the shah’s time, but in 1975, the shah had forced the Iraqi government to accept an accord, which had brought the dispute to an end. After the revolution, with the Iranian army having, in effect, been destroyed by the Islamic government, Saddam Hussein decided that he could use this opportunity to occupy parts of Iran and settle the border disputes. But within a short time, ordinary Iranians, the remaining members of the army, and the Revolutionary Guards repelled the Iraqi army; they took back most of the Iranian territory by early 1982.

When Maryam and Mohammad moved to Ahvaz, many cities in the region had been ravaged by Saddam’s army. Many lives had been ruined, and thousands of people had lost their homes. Maryam and Mohammad had chosen Ahvaz so they could help the refugees of the war. They also worked hard—she as a teacher and he as an engineer—in order to provide for their son, Khaled. Maryam decided to teach in one of the poorest areas in southern Iran, the city of Shadgan; it took her three hours every day to travel there and back by bus. Maryam never complained about the wretched conditions in which she had to live and work. She was proud of what she did, and thought it was her duty to help the people.

In Ahvaz, Maryam and Mohammad both joined the local Tudeh Party cells. They were low-ranking members, responsible only for attending meetings, distributing literature, and helping the refugees. At the time, the Tudeh Party still supported Khomeini, and some of its members even helped the Revolutionary Guards suppress other political groups that were against Khomeini, in the hope of preventing the return of a pro-Western government.

But in early 1983, Khomeini began to arrest and jail Tudeh Party members. Soon the tortured party leaders, some of whom had spent more than twenty years in the shah’s prisons and all of whom had supported the revolution, were paraded on state
television, confessing to spying for the Soviet Union and acting against the Islamic government.

Mohammad was picked up by the Revolutionary Guards in the spring of 1983, in the second wave of arrests. A week later, they came for Maryam. She was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (which was eventually reduced to six), in a sham trial before a judge and no jury. She wasn’t allowed a lawyer, and when she tried to object to the charges against her, the judge refused to let her speak. Though a six-year sentence was wholly unjust, at the time, my family and I were relieved that her life had been spared. The leaders of the Islamic regime were executing many political prisoners, and my parents knew many people whose children had been killed, including one young man who’d been put to death simply for writing to a friend that he feared the regime was on its way to becoming a fascist government.

With both of his parents incarcerated, Khaled came to live with my mother, my father, and me in Tehran. He was a cute, curly-haired toddler with a lot of energy and big, curious eyes. I was sixteen at the time. Part of me was excited—I had suddenly gained a younger brother. But on the first day he was with us, as my mother led Khaled by the hand through our house, it broke my heart to see how, from one room to the next, Khaled looked in each closet and under every bed for his mommy and daddy. He was not yet two years old.

My mother took Khaled into our home with her usual silent courage. For the next six years, while Maryam served her sentence for the crime of
moharebeh
, acting against Allah, my mother raised Khaled. And just as she had done three decades earlier with her husband, every month she would board a bus with Khaled and travel seventeen hours to visit Maryam in Ahvaz.

Maryam was released in 1989, once the Islamic government had killed most Tudeh leaders and was satisfied that the party no longer posed a threat. What Maryam told us about the beatings
and torture of prisoners horrified even my father. Many of the torturers of the Islamic regime had been prisoners under the shah and knew exactly what methods of interrogation and torture could break a person. “It will take Maryam years to get rid of the prison memories, the nightmares,” my mother told me a week after Maryam was released. I am not sure that Maryam ever fully recovered.

·   ·   ·

I thought I had done everything I could to avoid this suffering, and yet now the authorities had come for me. Since I’d first begun reporting in Iran, in 1997, making independent documentaries and writing for
Newsweek
magazine, I had taken every precaution and even censored myself in an attempt to stay below the radar. I’d chosen not to write about such sensitive subjects as separatist movements or ethnic and religious minorities. I’d made every effort to be honest and impartial, but I’d never been too critical of the regime, and certainly never of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who had taken over in 1989, after Ruhollah Khomeini died. I was very careful about whom I socialized with, dealing infrequently with foreigners—whom the government, as a rule, mistrusted. I had rarely dated in Iran to avoid provoking the country’s moral police. I was acutely aware of the government’s level of tolerance for things, and was careful not to cross any lines.